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botanical art philadelphia society of botanical illustrators

Watercolor Blossoms

“I was always interested in plants from houseplants to gardening outside even when I was a little kid,” says Joan Frain, botanical artist. This artist-to-be got a degree in graphic design.

“I didn’t want to end up in an ad agency, so I got a job at Longwood Gardens as a staff artist. I was instantly immersed in Longwood Gardens and botany and horticulture, so through them I went back to school and took courses in botany and taxonomy to botanically accurately depict these plants.”

At Longwood, Frain was a one-woman art department and also taught botanical illustration for continuing education. Later, she painted freelance for magazines and textbook and greeting card companies. One of her first commissions was for the Franklin Mint, painting First Day edition stamps of Flowers of The World in conjunction with the World Horticultural Society in London.

Frain currently designs packaging for Caswell-Massey bath fragrances. She does commissions, workshops, lectures, and teaches botanical art four days a week, private and group classes. “I’ve been strictly focused on botanical art for 35 years now. I need more time to paint for myself, so I don’t teach at all in the summers.”

Her dad, an amateur painter, started Joan painting in oils when she was four. He would set up a still life and two easels. “He’s the main gardener and he got me into that too. I was president of the art club in high school. I thought I was going to be graphic designer and that’s what I got my degree in. It’s kind of funny. I’m glad I did because you can paint a plant and you can be a precise draftsman and paint it perfectly but if it’s just plopped on the page, it still leaves you cold. You have to design it on the page and fool around with the graphics of it, too, to make it a complete piece. I’m really glad I got the graphics background.”

Frain sells original paintings and limited edition giclee.

So how does a professor of marketing become a botanical artist?

Ask Sarah Maxwell who changed careers and cities to call home. Maxwell, once a professor of marketing at Fordham University in New York City, became a botanical artist three years ago and moved to Philadelphia.

“I went to China and was teaching marketing,” she says, “and I picked up a little book on how to train children on Chinese watercolors. So I started doing Chinese watercolors, came back here and found botanical art.”

Maxwell admits she was never an artist of any sort before that, although she may have plied her creativity to marketing plans. She also admits she doesn’t know plants well but learns anew every day. “I pay a lot of attention to what other people tell me,” she says about gardening with those in the know at historic Powell House in Philadelphia.

“When you paint a plant you really learn it. There are many plants I never heard of and I now know what they are. I never knew what a cyclamen was. But now that I painted one, I know.”

Maxwell studied botanical art at The New York Botanical Garden and is a member of the Philadelphia Society of Botanical Illustrators (PSBI). She wrote The Price is Wrong: Understanding What Makes a Price Seem Fair and the True Cost of Unfair Pricing. Using her marketing savvy, she teaches the pricing of art at NYBG and PSBI.

Where does Maxwell hope to go with her art? “I don’t think I can look so much at where I want to go with it because I’m not even certain where that is. I love doing it and I think that’s what’s most important.” She sells original art.

Virginia Fitzpatrick of Wallingford, PA, and PSBI president, drew as a child, majored in print-making at college, got two degrees in art, and taught teachers how to teach art. So when she retired from teaching she went back to making art rather than teaching about it. She focused on botanical art after seeing a brochure of a PSBI exhibition at the Philadelphia Flower Show and began taking classes from Joan Frain.

Her husband is a gardener. “He has flowers all around our house. The ones I usually select have some life. They blow in the wind in such a way that it captures my attention or the petals curve, like Rudbeckia, or I do violets right now because the leaves and the petals all have curves and they look like they’re moving,” she says.

Fitzpatrick, herself not a gardener, learns plants as she paints. “Those that I’m painting, I study. I get all kinds of books and I have a close-up lens so I get really close but I haven’t taken a course in botany or horticulture. I wish I had when I was younger and my brain was going faster but I study the ones I have right now.”